About Me

Friday, July 31, 2015

The film was Tim Burton’s
1996 science-fiction epic Mars Attacks!, which began life as one of the weirdest story sources imaginable for a
major-studio, big-budget, major-star film: a series of bubble-gum cards. In
1962, for some reason, the Topps bubble-gum company decided to take a breather
from their usual business of sticking athletes’ pictures in with packages of
their bubble gum and instead plot out a 54-panel serial called Mars Attacks!, which would tell a continuous story of a Martian
invasion of Earth. The series became a brief fad among some of my fellow
grade-schoolers in the day and then was virtually forgotten by just about
everyone, including the executives at the Topps company (who gave up on the
serial-story concept and went back to baseball and football players), except
film director Tim Burton, who’d already had some unlikely successes (including Beetlejuice — his clever inversion of the Ghostbusters formula in which it was ghosts trying to get rid
of humans instead of the other way around — and the first two films in the
modern Batman cycle at a time when
superhero movies were actually considered a risk instead of a staple of the big
summer blockbuster market) and so he got the green light from Warner Bros. to
make a movie out of 54 bubble-gum cards. The original series writers,
uncredited on the film itself, were Len Brown, Woody Gelman, Wally Wood, Bob
Powell and Norm Saunders; Burton tabbed a writer with the intriguing name
Jonathan Gems to turn the basic concept into a script. I have only dim memories
of the card series so I don’t know how faithful, overall, the movie is to it,
but I do remember that the 54th
card in the series was headlined “Mars Destroyed!” and featured the Red Planet
blowing up as the result of a successful Earth counter-attack — alas, the movie
did not end that way!

The film has
at least three separate plot lines in three widely separated locales —
Washington, D.C., Las Vegas and a tiny town in Kansas whose only discernible
business is a doughnut shop identified with a giant replica doughnut with the
letters “DONUT” emblazoned on it, just in case any of the few passers-by didn’t
get the point. The people who run it, and apparently everybody else in town,
lives in trailers — though there’s a nursing home nearby which features prominently
in the plot — and the main characters in this part of the movie are the
Norrises: grandma Florence Norris (Sylvia Sidney, still playing quiet and
dignified even at that age), mother Sue Ann (O-Lan Jones), a father who isn’t
given a first name (Joe Don Baker) and their two kids, older brother Billy
Glenn (Jack Black) — a military enlistee of whom his folks are proud — and
younger brother Richie (Lukas Haas; it’s nice to be reminded of how cute this
guy once was, and he plays the sort of withdrawn character that a decade later
would have gone to Paul Dano), whom the family detests because he’s grown his
hair long, he isn’t interested in joining the military and he’d rather hang out
with his grandma at the nursing home than be with the rest of the clan. The
Washington, D.C. scenes are dominated by U.S. President James Dale (Jack
Nicholson), his wife Marsha (Glenn Close), White House press secretary Jerry
Ross (Martin Short), rival generals Decker (Rod Steiger) and Casey (Paul
Winfield), as well as a scientist, Donald Kessler (Pierce Brosnan), brought in
to advise the government on what to do about the Martian threat. (When Pierce
Brosnan entered after having starred in some of the James Bond series entries,
I couldn’t help but joke that he’d introduce himself as “Kessler … Donald Kessler.”) He ends up becoming a severed head
inside one of the Martian spaceships, along with Nathalie Lake (Sarah Jessica
Parker), the TV host who was interviewing him for the Today show and flirting with him — much to the disgust
of her husband, the show’s director — and there’s a good scene at the end in
which they try to make love with each other even though they’re only
disembodied heads. (Earlier Lake’s head ended up on the body of her Chihuahua
dog, and vice versa.)

The Vegas scenes center around Art Land (Jack Nicholson —
he played two parts but could do so easily since the two characters never
meet), who’s about to open a new casino/resort/hotel called the Galaxy and has
summoned investors (though it already seems to be completed and one wonders why
he needs additional money) and his
stereotypically dumb wife Barbara (Annette Bening, once again cast in a part
for which she was way
overqualified). The hotel is sufficiently finished that there’s already a show
going on in its showroom featuring singer Tom Jones, cast as himself — when the
camera panned to his three backup singers I couldn’t help but joke, “Ah, 40
Feet from a Mediocre Has-Been.” There’s also another major character in the Vegas scenes, burned-out
ex-boxer Byron Williams (played by burned-out ex-football player Jim Brown),
who works as a bouncer at an Egyptian-themed casino (and has to wear full King
Tut drag) and also doubles as some sort of entertainer putting on athletic
exhibitions, though we never see him do this. He’s anxious to get back to
Washington, D.C. to ride out the crisis with his estranged wife Louise (Pam
Grier) and their rambunctious, uncontrollable sons Cedric (Ray J) and Neville
(Brandon Hammond). In a scene that relates to absolutely nothing else in the
film but is one of the best things in it, Louise, who works as a bus driver,
spots her sons in a video arcade (playing, what else, a shoot-’em-up game in
which their fictional adversary is a Martian) instead of school, announces to
the passengers that they’re going to make an unscheduled stop, and then stops
the bus, invades the arcade, pulls her kids out of it and chews them out to the
cheers of the bus’s passengers. (Pam Grier, still kickin’ ass!)

The Martians
themselves are a cross between the “little green men” of classic sci-fi pulp
art and the Talosians from the pilot of the original Star Trek: scrawny beings with oversized crania and green
jelly instead of blood. They attack with ray guns against which, of course,
Earth’s weapons offer no defense, and when they shoot a person the victim’s
entire skin and muscles vaporize immediately and all that’s left is a skeleton
— both Charles and I wondered if someone like Tim Burton, who so loves the
worst 1950’s schlock sci-fi he actually made a biopic of Edward D. Wood, Jr.,
had copied this effect from Tom Graeff’s Teenagers from Outer Space, though Burton’s effects budget was several orders
of magnitude bigger than Graeff’s and his version of the effect is both more
convincing and more gross. The main plot point of Mars Attacks! is an interesting inversion of 1950’s sci-fi
movies like The Day the Earth Stood Still (from which Burton pretty obviously copied the flying-saucer “look” of
the Martian spacecraft) in which everyone in the government, from the President
on down — except for General Decker — insists that the Martians’ intentions in
visiting Earth are peaceful. Even when they shoot their ray guns at the dove of
peace released at the point of first contact by a young man in Las Vegas, and
then shoot the people there to meet them (under a big sign reading “WELCOME TO
EARTH”), President Dale and his advisors insist that these are merely
“misunderstandings” and they’re going to keep trying to talk to the Martians
instead of attack them.

Mars Attacks! is the sort of weird movie that doesn’t quite come off — the effective fusion of camp and action
Burton achieved in his two Batman movies eludes him here, and in trying to make his action scenes both
exciting and cartoony he all too frequently achieves neither. It nominally
takes place in the year 2000 — obviously picked for its symbolic millennial
significance — but there are some deliberate throwbacks to the early 1960’s,
when the basic story source originated, notably the universal translator that’s
supposed to render the Martians’ duck-like language into English (and which
keeps saying the Martians are saying, “We come in peace,” and “We are your
friends,” even while they’re vaporizing every human in sight with those damned
ray guns which look like plastic
toys on screen), whose memory seems to consist of four little spools of
magnetic tape. (Missing the parodistic intent, Charles wondered, “Who still
uses tape as a storage medium?”)
Inevitably, Mars Attacks! is a film of moments rather than a coherent whole, and equally
inevitably it’s filled with references to other movies — including a sequence
at the White House war room that can’t help but evoke Dr. Strangelove even though its propagandistic purpose is quite
the opposite: the general who’s advocating an all-out nuclear attack on the
Martians is clearly being presented as the sensible one, while the President
himself and the advisors (including Winfield’s General Casey, who’s quite
obviously drawn as a parody of Colin Powell) keep trying to “negotiate” with
extraterrestrial beings clearly bent on nothing but our total destruction —
though there’s a worm-turning sequence later in which General Ripper, oops, I
mean Decker wins approval to nuke the Martian ship — only the Martians have an
anti-missile defense system, a giant red balloon that swallows the
nuclear-armed missile, digests it and lets what’s left of its energy out with a
burp as it returns to its home craft.

In the end only seven of the 22 credited
principals are still alive, and the only thing that saves Earth from the
Martian invaders is Burton’s and Gems’ weird analogue for the earth bacteria
and viruses that destroyed the Martians in the obvious model for their story,
H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds. As he’s rescuing his grandma from the nursing home which is being
attacked by the Martians, Richie accidentally pulls out the jack from grandma’s
headphones — thereby playing the record she was listening to, an insane cover
of the Jeanette MacDonald-Nelson Eddy hit “Indian Love Call” by, of all people,
Slim Whitman — and the sound of Whitman’s voice is precisely the vibration
needed to blow up the Martians’ oversized heads and get the green jelly they
have in place of blood to spurt out picturesquely. Accordingly Richie and his
grandmother win the Medal of Honor (though one wonders just who awarded it to them since both the President and
Congress were vaporized in earlier scenes) and the film draws to an end that’s
about as quirky as the rest of it. Mars Attacks! is Tim Burton’s imagination running wild — it’s
O.K. entertainment but he’s made many movies that worked better because he kept
his rambunctious imagination more under control — but it has one rather odd
saving grace: Jack Nicholson’s performance as the President. As the hotel
promoter in Vegas he’s turning in typical Nicholson schtick and makes himself even more unwatchable than
Burton intended, but as the President he clearly modeled his performance on
Richard Nixon and turned in a good enough job that I came away convinced he
would have been a better choice than Anthony Hopkins or Frank Langella in the
two “serious” movies so far made about Nixon. I’ve never been a Nicholson fan —
that shark’s-teeth grin and vulpine laugh always put me off — but he’s one
actor Tim Burton seems to have got the best out of; his performance as the
Joker in the first Burton Batman seems to me the best work he’s ever done — the mannerisms that put me
off when Nicholson plays “serious” roles were just right as the comic villain
(Cesar Romero in the TV show overemphasized the camp; the late Heath Ledger in The
Dark Knight Returns made him too crazy; Nicholson got the balance just right) — and
once again here he got finely honed acting out of a performer who usually just
explodes — or throws up — on screen.

For the last two days PBS has been showing an interesting
group of movies about nuclear weapons and the atomic age in general. On Tuesday
they showed a two-hour special called The Bomb, which begins in 1938 with the famous letter physicist Leo Szilard
drafted urging the U.S. in general and President Franklin Roosevelt in
particular to get cracking on creating an atomic bomb before Germany got it
first and the Nazis were able to win World War II and do far more damage than
the formidable amount they actually did with what they had. Szilard realized
that he didn’t have enough clout to get the U.S. president to read a letter
from him, so he enlisted a physicist who did: Albert Einstein, then living on
the East Coast and teaching and doing research at Princeton University and just
as scared about the Nazis getting the atomic bomb as Szilard was. Roosevelt
ordered the U.S. Army to start a research project on the feasibility of nuclear
weapons, and he assigned it to the Manhattan Engineering District of the Army
Corps of Engineers. Then, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December
7, 1941, the U.S. declared war on Japan a day later and Hitler declared war on
the U.S. two days after that, Roosevelt ordered the “Manhattan Engineering District
Project” to set up a full-scale effort to design and build a workable atomic
weapon as soon as possible, and to do so in out-of-the-way secret locations:
Oak Ridge, Tennessee to produce enough fissile uranium to fuel the bomb;
Hanford, Washington to make plutonium in case the effort to enrich enough
uranium for a bomb didn’t work; and, most importantly, Los Alamos, New Mexico,
where the top scientists in the field were recruited to work under military
direction on what was essentially an engineering problem.

The basic physics
behind the bomb were known at the start and had been ever since 1938, when a
German physicist named Lise Meitner published a paper in Nature establishing that by bombarding it with neutrons,
she and her boss, Otto Hahn, had actually split a uranium atom into smaller
fragments, thereby releasing great quantities of energy. If enough fissile
uranium could be concentrated in what came to be called a “critical mass,” the
fission would release more neutrons, which would strike more nuclei of fissile
uranium, which would release more neutrons, start more fission, and so on and
so on until the resulting energy created a nuclear explosion through which an
entire city could be destroyed by a single bomb. (Interestingly, a number of
the early atomic scientists had read a novel by H. G. Wells published in 1914
called The World Set Free,
apparently the first work of fiction featuring atomic weapons, which he
dedicated to Frederick Soddy — a little-known British physicist who worked as
an assistant to Ernest Rutherford; the two were also instrumental in
documenting the incredible energy of radioactive substances like uranium and
the possible military uses of it — and at least some of the early scientists
involved in building the bomb had first thought it might be practical because
of Wells’ book.) The fact that the early work establishing the possibility of
nuclear fission had been done in Germany scared the shit out of Szilard,
Einstein and the many other physicists, quite a few of them Jewish, who had
fled the Nazis and settled in the U.S. The story of the Manhattan Project has
been told quite often — in books, in documentaries (including a 1970’s PBS
production called The Day After Trinity which I remember as even better than The Bomb) and even a dramatic fiction film, Fat Man
and Little Boy (named after the two sorts
of bomb the Manhattan Project produced — the uranium-fueled “gun” bomb used on
Hiroshima and the plutonium implosion bomb used on Nagasaki — and also evoking
the relationship between the two people in charge of the project, Army general
Leslie Groves, played by Paul Newman, and scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer) —
and it’s often treated as a sort of real-life Götterdämmerung in which an old world dies and a new one waits to be
born. (The famous lines from the Bhagavad-Gita Oppenheimer quoted after the Trinity test in July
1945 — “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds” — do tend to reinforce that impression.)

But these
programs — both The Bomb and a
two-part program PBS aired after it called Uranium: Twisting the
Dragon’s Tail — suggest that atomic energy
in general and atomic weaponry in particular just fit neatly into humanity’s
long and all too fruitful quest for newer, more efficient and more lethal ways
to destroy large chunks of itself. Both of them suggested that the atomic bomb
became a cultural icon relatively quickly in its history — Uranium even includes some of the 1950’s songs about or
referencing the Bomb that were included in the marvelous 1983 documentary The
Atomic Café, though they appeared to be
re-recordings by modern artists rather than the originals used in The
Atomic Café (and I’d still like a chance to
hear again the beautiful country ballad “The Cold War Over You” by Floyd
Tillman, which anticipates Elvis Costello’s early songs equating disputes
between lovers in a relationship with tensions between entire countries, used
by the makers of The Atomic Café over
the closing credits of their film). PBS showed the first part of Uranium on Tuesday and the second part last night,
Wednesday, after yet another nuclear-themed show — one about the horrendous
disaster that destroyed two nuclear reactors in Japan during the earthquake and
tsunami at Fukushima, and the increasingly desperate jury-rigging the reactor
crew had to do to try to stop the reactor cores from melting down and/or the
containment vessels from exploding under pressure from the hydrogen released as
part of a meltdown (a problem nuclear engineers weren’t even aware of until it happened at Three Mile Island in 1979).
The shows covered much of the same material but the presentations were
dramatically different: The Bomb,
written and directed by Rushmore DeNooyer, used an off-screen omniscient
narrator, Jonathan Adams, who sounded to me too annoyingly chipper (PBS’s
resident narrator, Will Lyman, would have been a better choice), while Uranium was written and directed by Wain Fimeri for
Australian TV and hosted on-screen by a quite attractive young man — Charles
called him a “physitwink” — named Derek Muller, who in the second half did the
Michael Moore number and got into the so-called “exclusion zones” around
Chernobyl and Fukushima (places where people were given emergency evacuations
after the nuclear accidents and have not been allowed to return since, though
the Fukushima survivors are at least allowed to return to their homes for
occasional short visits to savor what they had to leave behind, which is
probably an emotional wrench for some because all too many of the former
Fukushimans are still living in the “temporary” emergency trailers they were
put into while the accident was still happening).

Uranium tells a somewhat broader story than The
Bomb, beginning with the discovery of
uranium in a played-out gold mine in what is now the Czech Republic (the name
for uranium ore, “pitchblende,” is apparently a play on the Czech word for
“played out,” and conveyed the sentiment among the miners that when they
started finding that stuff instead of gold, it was bad news because it meant
there was no longer any recoverable gold in that mine and their jobs would soon
end). Uranium was considered a useless metal until French professor Henri
Becquerel made his famous experiments, exposing uranium to sunlight (though,
contrary to Fimeri’s film, he actually did his experiments with compounds —
so-called “uranium salts” — rather than pure metallic uranium because uranium
salts could acquire fluorescent properties if exposed to sunlight) and seeing
that there was an energy inside it that could “fog” a piece of photographic plate
put under the uranium and wrapped in lightproof paper. One day Becquerel
accidentally brought the uranium and his paper-wrapped plate into contact and
found that, even without the intervention of sunlight, the uranium fogged the
plate — indicating that whatever was exposing the film was an energy source
from the uranium itself. Today we call this “radioactivity” and don’t think
it’s that big a deal. Muller explained on-screen how uranium atoms transform
themselves by shedding what are called alpha particles from their nuclei —
these are combinations of two protons and two neutrons, and since the number of
protons in an atomic nucleus is what determines what element it is, each time a
uranium nucleus sheds an alpha particle it becomes a different element, which
is itself radioactive until, after five transitions, it reaches down from
atomic number 92, uranium, to 82, lead, which is not radioactive. (At least most lead isn’t; it wouldn’t
surprise me if an atomic physicist somewhere hasn’t either discovered or
created a radioactive isotope of lead.) Muller argued (as a lot of writers
about this history have before him) that uranium fulfilled the dream of the
ancient alchemists of “transmutation” of one element into another, and he even
told a story of an argument between Rutherford and Soddy in which Soddy
suggested using the term “transmutation” for this property of uranium and
Rutherford saying, “Don’t dare
call it that! We’ll be hanged if we do!”

This also leads to the often
misunderstood concept of “half-life” to mean just how radioactive a substance is; a half-life is simply
the length of time it takes for half your original sample to decay from
radioactive to non-radioactive. The Bomb, after a pretty in-depth depiction of the Manhattan Project and what
they were up against in trying to create a bomb — which makes the interesting
contention that the reason Joseph Stalin was so disinterested in the news when
Harry Truman told him at Potsdam, Germany that the U.S. had invented an atomic
weapon was he already knew about it. Though the alleged “atom spy ring”
involving Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, her brother David Greenglass, Harry Gold
and Morton Sobell was a joke, the Russians did have a real atom spy at Los Alamos, expatriate
German physicist and Communist Dr. Klaus Fuchs, and The Bomb named another Russian spy among the scientists at
Los Alamos of whom I’d never heard before; Fuchs was eventually caught but,
since he was a British national — he’d fled there from Germany and naturalized
as a British citizen before coming to the U.S. to work on the bomb — he was
punished by the British court
system and was thereby spared the McCarthyite hysteria that engulfed the
Rosenbergs and got them executed. Still, it was a surprising (though not
unbelievable) contention that the information the Russians were getting from
Los Alamos had reached all the way to the top. The Bomb rather races through the aftermath of the story —
the development of the hydrogen bomb, the firing of J. Robert Oppenheimer from
any further role in U.S. atomic research for refusing to work on it
(masterminded, according to these films, not by Dr. Edward Teller but by Lewis
Strauss, Eisenhower’s appointee as the head of the U.S. Atomic Energy
Commission) and the high hopes for “atoms for peace” — for nuclear power as a
cheap, inexhaustible source of electricity and other forms of energy — which a
number of the scientists who had worked on the bomb hoped would absolve them
from their responsibility for creating a weapon with the potential to destroy
all humanity.

Uranium ends with
some bizarre scenes attempting to argue that nuclear energy isn’t all that dangerous — the show makes the claim that no one
died from long-term exposure to the radiation at Chernobyl or Fukushima (though
it does concede that the Russian
firefighters sent into Chernobyl immediately after the disaster to put the
fires out — and dressed, the archive footage shows, in ridiculously
unprotective clothes that look like the sorts of things worn by the extras in Monty
Python and the Holy Grail — died from
short-term radiation sickness, and as Muller strolls through the room at
Chernobyl where those clothes are still stored, his Geiger counter readings literally go off the chart) and even repeats the Big Lie from
the modern-day nuclear industry that nuclear power is “clean” because it
doesn’t emit carbon. This ignores not only the vivid dangers of nuclear power
in the real world (I can’t imagine anyone could watch the NOVA episode on Fukushima sandwiched between these two
shows and argue that nuclear power is a good thing; if nothing else, the margin
of error for this unforgiving technology and the myriad ways in which both
accidents and human mistakes can cascade into events threatening the lives of
hundreds of thousands of people argues for the abolition of nuclear power
forever) but also the huge contributions to global warming, climate change and
carbon production by the other elements in the nuclear fuel cycle, from the
huge amounts of energy expended in mining pitchblende, extracting the uranium
from it, running it through gas-diffusion centrifuges (which involves turning
the uranium into a highly caustic gas, uranium hexafluoride, and spinning it so
the uranium hexafluoride molecules containing the fissile U-235 isotope from
the non-fissile and far more common U-238 separate and can be turned back into
uranium metal with a high enough U-235 concentration: 3 to 5 percent for a
power reactor, 20 percent for a research reactor or to produce nuclear
medicines, 80 to 95 percent for a bomb) and forming it into fuel rods; also the
enormous amount of heat nuclear power plants release into the ocean because
that’s where the hot water is pumped after it has, in the form of steam, turned
the turbines that power the generators that actually create electricity. To me,
there is fundamentally no moral, ethical or practical difference between
nuclear weapons and nuclear power: both are evil technologies and should be abolished (though I might make an
exception and allow a few small reactors to remain for health purposes only — Uranium contains a heart-rending story about a radioactive
medicine used in Australia to help diagnose cancers — which, of course,
radiation can also cause). I argued in the pages of Zenger’s
Newsmagazine that there were at least two technologies
whose basic premises were so fundamentally evil in terms of the dangers they
pose to life on earth that they should be banned: one was nuclear energy and
the other was genetic engineering of living organisms, which seems to me to be
“twisting the dragon’s tail” of evolution and potentially laying waste to the
biosphere in ways that make even the greatest potential nuclear disasters look
like nothing by comparison.

Monday, July 27, 2015

Charles and I watched a
Lifetime movie together, and it proved to be an unexpectedly good one: Lost
Boy, a 2015 production
directed by Tara Miele (whose superb atmospherics and the performances she gets
from her actors score yet another point for women directors) from a script by
Jennifer Maisel. The story premise has a family resemblance to another Lifetime
movie from years ago, When Andrew Came Home (2000) in that both center around a grieving
mother who suddenly comes face-to-face with her long-lost son who disappeared
years before — only where the boy in Andrew definitely is her long-lost son and he’s still well within pre-pubescence (Andrew
disappeared at 5 and returned at 10), the situation in Lost Boy is played more powerfully for ambiguity and the
kid, Mitchell Harris (Matthew Fahey), disappeared at 6 and (presumably)
reappeared at 17, about to be emancipated and in the full flush of sexual
maturity. During the years her son has been gone, mom Laura Harris (Virginia
Madsen from the cast of Sideways, top-billed) has become a major advocate for the parents of missing
children, and she’s been able to help other parents handle the reunification of
their families even while her own son still remains among the missing. Alas,
her home life hasn’t been so happy; Mitchell’s fraternal twin sister Summer
(Sosie Bacon — not Susie, Sosie!) is being raised by her dad as a single parent — the Harrises have
divorced not only over the strain of having a missing kid but over Laura
inevitably and unconsciously neglecting the children she still has, Summer and
her younger brother Jonathan (Jacob Buster), in favor of her memories of
Mitchell.

Dad Greg Harris (Mark Valley) wants mom to sell the house — which
she, inevitably, has kept exactly the way it was when Mitchell disappeared,
including preserving his room as a sort of shrine to him — and both of them to
divorce and move on with their lives, especially since he has a new girlfriend,
Amanda (Carly Pope), and has impregnated her and naturally wants the two of them to be able to
marry and raise their upcoming daughter in a normal family environment. The
first intimation that the supposed “Mitchell Harris” isn’t who he’s claiming to
be comes when he insists on Greg bringing Jonathan along for the DNA test he’s
agreed to go through to establish that he is Mitchell. He grabs the blood
sample needle and extracts some of Jonathan’s blood while the two boys are
alone together, then has to quickly change his plans and stick a swab in
Jonathan’s mouth when he finds they’re going to run the test on saliva instead
of blood. Whoever he is, Mitchell also turns out to have a dark side, taking
Jonathan out into the woods and burning him, first with a candle and then with
what appears to be a lit cigarette. Mitchell is drawn as psychotic, though
unlike most Lifetime writers, who if anything overexplain their plots, Jennifer Maisel keeps his real
motives and mental state as powerfully ambiguous as his identity. Matthew
Fahey’s performance, vividly realized under Miele’s direction, avoids both the
usual stereotypes of how to play a psycho on screen — the snarling one
exemplified by Lawrence Tierney in late-1940’s and early-1950’s movies like Born
to Kill and The Hoodlum and the low-keyed boy-next-door variety pioneered
by Alfred Hitchcock’s direction of Anthony Perkins in Psycho. Instead Fahey conveys mental distress through
twitchy movements and breathy, barely in-control vocal intonations surprisingly
reminiscent of James Dean (indicating that Fahey might not be bad casting for a
Dean biopic even though the two don’t look all that much alike aside from both being young, slender
white men). He looks a lot more like the real-life crazy people I’ve known than
the usual depiction of mental illness we get in the movies!

It all comes to a
head at the lake where the real Mitchell Harris disappeared in the first place,
where he’s kidnapped Jonathan (he’s taken one of the Harris family cars, since
it’s already been established that he knows how to drive) and Laura has to go
in the water, even though she never learned to swim (though the thrashing about
she does in the lake is at least vaguely effective in getting her where she
needs to be), to rescue her real son from the psycho impostor. Afterwards,
instead of a big scene in which Mitchell either definitively dies or gets his
legal comeuppance, Laura agrees that the police can stop dragging the lake for
his corpse — and there’s a final tag scene in which Mitchell (or whoever he
is), dressed as he was at the beginning — scruffy jeans and a hoodie — is
hitchhiking along the side of a road, evidently planning to insinuate himself
into another family that has lost a son
and work his scheme again. What makes Lost Boy unusual for a Lifetime movie is the overall
ambiguity; we’re never told who “Mitchell” really is, what his motive for
impersonating the real Mitchell — in fact, it’s never definitively established
that he isn’t the real Mitchell, though
the presumption we’re supposed to come to after his elaborate monkeying around
with the DNA testing process is he isn’t and wants Jonathan’s blood and saliva
in the tests so it will come back saying they’re blood relatives is that he’s
faking it — and whereas another Lifetime writer, including Christine Conradt,
would probably have inserted an elaborate subplot establishing who “Mitchell”
really is and written in a subsidiary character masterminding the whole scheme
for some untoward purpose, Maisel leaves it all unstated, hinting in that final
scene that he’s pulled this before and will most likely pull it again for
motives that are only to be guessed at. Was “Mitchell” really kidnapped and
abused sexually? Is he looking for a family with whom he can connect? Is he
psychologically compelled to repeat the abuse scenarios to which he was
subjected? Or all of the above? We don’t know, and Miele and Maisel aren’t
about to tell us — which itself (along with the sheer power and realism of
Fahey’s performance) sets Lost Boy apart from most of the Lifetime fare and indicates that they’re both
worthy of bigger and better assignments.

Saturday, July 25, 2015

PBS’s Great Performances
series did a concert special with Gustavo Dudamel conducting the Los Angeles
Philharmonic in a 90-minute tribute to the music of … John Williams. Yes, that John Williams, who after a period in the 1950’s when
he lived in New York (where he was born: Flushing, Queens — where did they get
those names?) and went to the Juilliard School by day and hung out on the jazz
scene by night, becoming an O.K. if nothing special jazz pianist, moved to
Hollywood and ended up working as an assistant and orchestrator for Alfred
Newman, Franz Waxman, Bernard Herrmann (in which capacity he met Alfred
Hitchcock — the show’s biographical segment included a photo of Williams with
Hitchcock and Herrmann) and other major film composers, which gave him a chance
to learn the trade from the masters and ultimately become probably the most
successful film composer of all time. Oddly, the movie that (at least according
to this show) first established him on the “A”-list was the 1972 adaptation of Fiddler
on the Roof, based on the Broadway musical
with Jerry Bock as composer and Sheldon Harnick as lyricist — but Williams got
a “Music Arranged and Conducted By” credit and he made the rather preposterous
statement that he had to compose a seven-minute stretch of music, based on
Bock’s themes but with a lot of original development required, to cover the
opening credits. “Broadway musicals don’t have long instrumental introductions
like that,” Williams said on camera — actually they do; they’re called
“overtures.” At one point Dudamel referred on-camera to Williams as a “genius,”
which is preposterous — Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Wagner were geniuses; John
Williams is a capable craftsman who writes serviceable and sometimes stirring
music for films, but he pales by comparison not only to the giants of the 18th
and 19th century but to the great film composers of Hollywood’s
classical era (including Erich Wolfgang Korngold, whose grandeur in films like The
Adventures of Robin Hood Williams seems to
try to emulate every time he has a subject that requires him to portray
heroism).

There was a brief sequence with Williams and Steven Spielberg looking
at a Moviola and Williams explaining that he doesn’t like to think about what he’s going to compose for a film until he
can see at least a director’s rough cut — which has always surprised me; I
would have assumed a film composer would want to start work as soon as the film
was in final script form before
it actually went before the cameras, but in some cases composers like Max Steiner
would come in at an even later stage than Williams and refuse to compose
anything until the film was in final
cut. Williams also recalled that for the final scene of E.T. he was unable to conduct his orchestra in the strict
tempo needed to fit Spielberg’s visuals — so Spielberg made him one of the most
unusual offers a director has ever given a composer. He told Williams to stop
looking at the screen and just conduct the music as he felt it, and Spielberg
would adjust his editing so the film would fit the music instead of the other
way around. Alas, that sequence from E.T. was not among the works
featured in the concert portions of the program: instead we got an appealing
mix of the familiar, the quasi-familiar and the totally unfamiliar. The
familiar included the Olympic Fanfare (played by the U.S. Army Herald Trumpets)
and accompanying theme, the theme from Schindler’s List (with Itzhak Perlman, who played on the original
soundtrack, saying that’s the one piece of music he’s played he gets requests
for all around the world, no matter where he appears), the seven-minute
arrangement of Jerry Bock’s Fiddler on the Roof music mentioned earlier, an orchestral medley from Star
Wars (along with a march of the storm
troopers for which Williams took the baton from Dudamel and conducted himself;
it also featured actors marching across the stage in storm trooper costumes,
including one dressed as Darth Vader, and both Charles and I expected the “Darth Vader” to push
Williams off the podium and finish the conducting himself with his prop light
saber), the infamous tuba solo from Jaws, and — ironically — the theme for the Great Performances series itself, which — previously unbeknownst to me,
Williams wrote.

The not-so-familiar and decidedly unfamiliar included two more
selections from Schindler’s List,
“Remembrances” and “Jewish Town: Krakow Ghetto, 1941” (also featuring Perlman);
and three selections from the 2002 film Catch Me if You Can (about real-life con artist Frank Abagnale, Jr.,
played by Leonardo di Caprio, and the FBI agent assigned to catch him, Carl
Hanratty, played by Tom Hanks), for which Williams reached back to his jazz
days for inspiration (the film took place in the 1960’s and director Spielberg
wanted a score that would sound like it belonged in that period; he also hired
Saul Bass to do the credits sequence and Bass came through with a series of
geometric animations much like the credits sequences he’d done for Hitchcock,
Preminger and other major directors back then). He said he wrote an alto sax solo
part with Charlie Parker’s sound in mind, though the player we actually heard,
Don Higgins, had a lighter tone, more like Paul Desmond or Lee Konitz — not bad
models — than Parker. The three selections from Catch Me if You Can — “Closing In,” “Reflections” and “Joy Ride”
— were among the most appealing parts of the program, not only because of
their relative unfamiliarity but also because they showed Williams to be
capable of sounds other than the big-orchestra “classic” style of most of his
film scores. Indeed, the most interesting piece on the program was Soundings, not written for a movie but composed as an
occasional piece for the dedication of Walt Disney Concert Hall in L.A., where
the concert took place. Soundings
is a self-consciously “modern” piece, and though nothing in it would sound
unfamiliar to devotees of Debussy, Ravel or Bartók, it was a welcome breath of
fresh air in its musical complexity and made me wish Williams would bring some
of that relative sophistication to his film scores. Alas, in an atrocious bit
of production the filmmakers actually cut to an interview segment between
Williams and Dudamel in the middle of Soundings — the kind of sin committed all too often in TV
programs about music.

Probably the lowest point of the program occurred during
a piece of music from, ironically, one of the best films included: a piece for
children’s choir and orchestra from Amistad called “Dry Your Tears, Africa” (spelled “Dry Your
Tears, Afrika” on the film’s imdb.com page), with the Los Angeles Children’s
Master Chorale obliged to keep straight faces while making their way through an
interminably sappy piece of writing from a poem by one Bernard Dadié, and
Williams attempting a musical depiction of the burden of slavery by ripping off
the opening of the “Work Song” from Duke Ellington’s Black, Brown and
Beige (yet another example, like the
imitation Wagner of the Star Wars
movies — the makers of the Star Wars
parody Hardware Wars scored
brilliantly by accompanying their interstellar battles with real Wagner, the “Ride of the Valkyries” in particular —
of Williams stealing from someone who really was a genius). Like Andrew Lloyd Webber, John Williams
is a “comfort composer,” one who can be counted on to deliver the goods for a
mass-market movie (in Lloyd Webber’s case, a mass-market musical) without
producing anything too threatening or too ear-bending for a large audience;
I’ve liked some of his music, gritted my teeth at the banality of some of his
scores, but I certainly don’t confuse him with the true giants of music (or
even the true giants of film music, including the now-departed ones he used to
work for) and calling him a “genius” quite frankly does him no favors. He’s a
competent craftsman, and sometimes an inspired one, and his sensibility is sufficiently
middle-brow it’s obvious why mass-market filmmakers like Spielberg and George
Lucas use him again and again.

The film was Just
Imagine, a 1930 science-fiction
musical — yes, you read that right (though long-term readers of this
blog will recall an even weirder mash-up from five years later:
Mascot/Republic’s The Phantom Empire, a 15-chapter serial that was a science-fiction musical Western
starring Gene Autry in his star-making performance!) produced at Fox pre-20th
Century merger (and therefore, like virtually all the pre-merger Fox films,
woefully ignored by the people Rupert Murdoch has in charge of their home-video
department — important or just plain interesting movies like Allan Dwan’s 1931 Wicked, Rowland V. Lee’s 1933 Zoo in Budapest, Henry King’s 1934 Marie Galante, Erich von Stroheim’s 1933 Hello, Sister! — his last film as a director, and like virtually
all his extant directorial efforts only a pale shadow of what he intended, but
fascinating anyway — and perhaps the prize of the bunch, William K. Howard’s
1933 The Power and the Glory, with a script by Preston Sturges that anticipates Citizen Kane and the finest performance Spencer Tracy gave in
his years at Fox, remain frustratingly unavailable) and put out on a DVD of
uncertain provenance that, though I bought it through Amazon.com, has about the
quality level of a better-than-usual download from archive.org. Just Imagine came about, I suspect, because its creators — the
writing-songwriting-producing team of Buddy de Sylva, Lew Brown and Ray
Henderson — had just released Sunnyside Up, one of the biggest musical hits of the early sound era and a film that
was a blockbuster success, generated three hit songs (“Keep Your Sunny Side
Up,” “If I Had a Talking Picture of You,” and “I’m a Dreamer, Aren’t We All?”)
and also offered one of the most exciting, spectacular and visually inventive
production numbers of the pre-Berkeley era, “Turn On the Heat” (filmed in
Howard Hughes’ short-lived Multicolor process but, alas, extant only in
black-and-white).

Sunnyside Up had been such a great success that the people running the Fox studio
(basically a consortium of finance-company executives after its founder,
William Fox, had run aground financially due to the Depression and his
ill-advised overextension of his resources, including a nearly successful
attempt at an unfriendly takeover of MGM) gave de Sylva, Brown and Henderson carte
blanche to do whatever they wanted
to do for their next project. What they wanted to do was a bizarre
science-fiction fantasy at least loosely inspired by Fritz Lang’s Metropolis — they avoided the muddled class-struggle politics
of Lang’s and Thea von Harbou’s script but art directors Stephen Goosson and
Ralph Hammeras copied the look of Metropolis so closely stills from Just Imagine have appeared in film reference books attributed
to the Lang/von Harbou film! It starts out with a comic prologue set in 1880,
when vehicles were still pulled by horses, saloons still existed and life was
quieter and slower-paced. Then it moves to a sequence set in the present — 1930
— in which a Pete Smith-style narrator gives us a blow-by-blow account of a
pedestrian trying to jaywalk across a New York street, and he seems to have
dodged all the cars until one hits him right when he’s almost across. After
that we get a title saying that if we think there’ve been dramatic changes
between 1880 and 1930, “Just imagine — 1980!” (The title comes from a beautiful
ballad de Sylva, Brown and Henderson had written for their 1927 hit stage show Good
News, which was enough of a hit
at the time it got several recordings, though the most lovely version is Judy
Garland’s incandescent one for her 1955 album Judy, arranged — beautifully — by Nelson Riddle; but
MGM had already bought the movie rights to Good News and the song “Just Imagine” doesn’t appear in the
film Just Imagine.) In 1980 people have
numbers — actually alphanumeric combinations — instead of names, all
applications for marriage licenses have to be approved by a government bureau
which says yea or nay on the basis of how “important” the prospective groom is,
airplanes and hovercraft autogiros have replaced cars as the standard means of
transport — there’s an incredible early scene in which the traffic is being
directed by a cop who’s delivering signals from a pod hanging in mid-air — and
if a couple wants a baby, they just put some money into a vending machine and
order one.

The film’s star is El Brendel, the Swedish dialect comedian who’s
cast as a man who in 1930 was put under suspended animation when he was struck
by a lightning flash while playing golf. His body has been recovered by a
famous doctor who intends to bring it back to life with some unsurprisingly Frankenstein-esque high-tech gizmos (though Just Imagine was actually released November 23, 1930, almost a
year before Frankenstein came out
on November 21, 1931); when he does so Brendel is a Rip Van Winkle-esque
character who has trouble adjusting to his new world. He also needs a new
alphanumeric name to replace his old one, and he settles on “Single-0” (which,
according to one imdb.com “Trivia” poster, is also the name for a carnival act
featuring just one person). One of the odder conceits of the de
Sylva-Brown-Henderson script (they’re credited with music, lyrics and dialogue,
while the film’s director, David Butler, is given credit for “continuity”) is
that Prohibition is still very much in force; when the male lead, J-21 (John
Garrick, whose stentorian voice, pleasant personality and lack of much in the way
of acting chops mark him as a sort of beta version of Nelson Eddy), tells
Single-0 that soon they might get around to legalizing light wines and beer,
Single-0 says, “They’ve been saying that for 50 years!” Instead of eating the way we do now, people in this
version of 1980 take all their nourishment via pills — though they still get
the sensation of old-fashioned meals — and the bootleggers offer their wares
through highly potent pills (one of the weirder ways in which the predictions
of Just Imagine have come
true; one of today’s worst substance abuse problems is the illegal distribution
of prescription pills). Another good call: after you wash your hands in 1980,
you dry them with a hot-air dryer (though then you do something that didn’t happen: you press a button to make the sink fold
back in the wall once it’s no longer needed.) One of the film’s funniest
moments — though you have to be familiar with the background to appreciate it —
is that all the manufacturers of airplanes, both airliners and private ones,
have Jewish names: Rosenblatt, Pinkus, Goldfarb. “It looks like someone got
even with Henry Ford!” Single-0 comments — a joke that had Charles laughing
uproariously even though you’d only get it if you knew that Henry Ford was a
notorious anti-Semite (he bought a small weekly called the Dearborn
Independent to turn into a vehicle for
his articles attacking Jews, and then compiled the articles into a book called The
International Jew that Adolf Hitler cited as
a source — which made it grimly ironic that the first commercial TV showing of
Steven Spielberg’s anti-Holocaust film Schindler’s List was sponsored by the Ford Motor Company).

Anyway,
the plot of Just Imagine concerns
the frustrated love of J-21 for his girlfriend LN-18 (Maureen O’Sullivan), frustrated
not by her — she’s as in love with him as he is with her — but by her father,
who encouraged another man, MT-3 (Kenneth Thomson), to apply for her hand
instead of J-21. Since MT-3 is more “important” by whatever criteria the
marriage tribunal uses (we’re never quite clear on that, though there’s a funny
bit in which J-21 is railing at a woman census taker who comes to his home
about how unfair the marriage law is, and she replies, “It, like the Volstead
Act, is a noble experiment!,” a reference to then-President Herbert Hoover’s
defense of Prohibition as “an experiment noble in purpose”), they rule that
LN-18 must marry him instead
of J-21, the man she really loves. There’s also a subsidiary romantic intrigue
between J-21’s roommate, RT-42 (Frank Albertson) — a name which can’t help but
recall the robot R2-D2 in a far more famous Fox movie, Star Wars, 47 years later — and his inamorata, D-6 (Marjorie White, playing a typical
dumb-blonde character, though at least she and Albertson do some hot dance duets
together and she’s cute and charming instead of oppressive), though since there
aren’t any rival claimants for her hand their relationship runs along without discernible
complications. J-21 makes a dangerous Romeo-style attempt to visit LN-18 by
climbing up the high-tech split-level walls on the outside of her apartment
building, but he’s caught when Single-0 comes in and “outs” him while he’s
trying to hide from her dad and MT-3. Despondent, J-21 goes for a walk around
the city and stops at a bridge — where he’s accosted by B-36 (Mischa Auer,
dressed oddly in a Dracula-style cape that makes one wonder if this future contains vampires that
have reached a modus vivendi with the normal people à la Gail Carriger’s Finishing School series), who asks him if he’s planning to commit suicide. “No, but that
wouldn’t be a bad idea,” J-21 says. It turns out that B-36 is the assistant to
the legendary scientist Z-4 (Hobart Bosworth), who’s building a spaceship to
travel to Mars. It’s powered by an anti-gravity substance he’s invented, and he
needs someone to fly it — and J-21, who’s an airline pilot in his work life
(though he’s never shown actually doing
that), is the perfect choice. J-21 begs off at first until Z-4 convinces him
that if he really flies to Mars and back, he will be the most “important” person on earth and
therefore the court hearing his appeal of the marriage case will have to let him marry LN-18. If the spaceship looks
incredibly familiar, it should; Universal later bought the full-size exterior
and interior sets of it, as well as the models, and used them in the Flash
Gordon serials.

The only wrinkle
is that Z-4 makes J-21 and his roommate RT-42 keep the destination of their
flight secret until they actually take off — only J-21 writes LN-18 a letter
and solemnly instructs her not to open it until 4 the next morning, when the
ship will take off. Of course, she pushes the clock hands forward and opens it
anyway, freaks out when she realizes what her man wants to do, and races to the
field where the takeoff is supposed to be (Maureen O’Sullivan’s performance
when she reads the letter and freaks out over its contents is oddly overacted
for this normally restrained player, though the rest of her acting is quite
good and shows why, out of all the Just Imagine cast members, she’s the one you’re most likely to
have heard of today, even though it does seem a bit odd to see her carrying a torch for a normally-dressed
near-future human instead of a hot guy in a loincloth in the jungle).
Fortunately, she misses the takeoff — the ship flies and she’s knocked down by
the exhaust (luckily she’s not harmed by it) — and J-21 and RT-42 get to Mars.
Alas, they find out they have a stowaway on board; like the ones in Aelita before him and Lost in Space afterwards, Single-0 got on the ship and hid out
in a storage box. When they get to Mars the Red Planet is full of exotically
costumed creatures (all but two of whom seem to be female) who spend their days
staging big production numbers in front of elaborate sets (the giant idol in
front of which they dance looked oddly familiar and it also may have turned up
in Flash Gordon), including Queen Loo Loo
(Joyzelle Joyner, who according to imdb.com was one of only two cast members of Just
Imagine who lived long enough to
see the real 1980; Maureen O’Sullivan was the other) and her consort, Loko (Ivan Linow), who’s so nellie that
even someone as resolutely un-butch as El Brendel can’t help but comment,
“She’s not the queen — he is!” Indeed, he does seem to take a shine to Single-0’s dubious charms, and despite the
language barrier (de Sylva, Brown, Henderson and Butler did not bother to invent a universal translator, telepathy
or some other gimcrack that would have allowed the Earthlings and the Martians
to communicate with each other) he bonds with Single-0.

Alas, it turns out that
every Martian is a twin — one good, one evil — and Our Heroes fall into the
clutches of the bad queen
Boo Boo and her bad consort BoKo (also Joyzelle Joyner and Ivan Linow), until
the good Loko rescues them through a professionally constructed tunnel that
appears to have lain under their cell the whole time (“Who do they think they
are — Mexican drug lords?” joked Charles) and they fly back to Earth. J-21
arrives just in time for his marriage appeal to be heard by judge X-10 (Wilfred
Lucas, whom I’m sure I’ve see play judges in contemporarily set films). He
announces that he’s just been to Mars and back, and naturally MT-3 challenges
him and says, “Prove it.” Luckily he can, because unbeknownst to the three
Earthling astronauts, Loko the good Martian giant had such a crush on Single-0 he stowed away in the ship on its way back, and he
emerges in the courtroom, J-21 wins his marriage case, he and LN-18 end up
together and there’s a funny tag scene in which an ancient man with a full
white beard comes up to El Brendel and introduces himself as his long-lost son.
Along the way we get at least six de Sylva-Brown-Henderson songs, none of them
particularly distinguished — though at least one is a romantic ballad, listed
on imdb.com as “(I Am the Words) You Are the Melody,” though I’ve seen it
elsewhere called “Song of Love” (“I am only the words, you are the melody/But
it takes the two to make a song of love”), which became at least a minor hit in
1930. The film also includes a drinking song — remember that the “drinks” are
not great steins of beer but little vials of pills — a hot dance duo for
Albertson and White, and a truly odd song called “Never Swat a Fly” that was
obviously, shall we say, inspired by Cole Porter’s “Let’s Do It” but gets taken in an unusual direction
as we actually get an extreme close-up of two flies, who seem to be doing
little more than coexisting adjacently on a table but are supposedly making
love (which according to the song is why you should never swat a fly — because
you might be interrupting its love affair with another fly; who knew de Sylva,
Brown and Henderson were unwittingly writing a hymn for Jainists?).

It also
features absolutely stunning and utterly convincing special effects, as well as
an overall insouciance that’s
quite appealing if you can accept this film’s total weirdness, its mishmash of
standard clichés and odd future speculations. Remember that at the time this
film was made “science fiction” basically meant Jules Verne and H. G. Wells —
the great outpouring of writers into the pioneering sci-fi pulps of the 1930’s
and 1940’s hadn’t happened yet — and so there wasn’t that much of a cliché bank
for wanna-be sci-fi writers to tap into. Just Imagine is an historical curio in more ways than one, and
I doubt if it actually made money (imdb.com lists its budget of over $1 million
but doesn’t say whether it earned it back); as it stands it’s a good film, but
as I watched it this time (I’d seen it many years before, in the early 1970’s)
I couldn’t help but indulge my tendency to recast classic (or not-so-classic)
films with other actors around when it was made. What, I kept asking myself, if
Fox had borrowed Buster Keaton from MGM and cast him as Single-0? Keaton’s monotone voice (which has
been criticized but I’ve always thought a perfect analogue to his “great stone
face” impassivity) would have played the comic dialogue at least as well as El
Brendel’s Swedish accent, and in terms of the physical comedy, there’d have
been no contest. I couldn’t help but think Keaton would have eaten up the
challenge of creating and performing comic business with and around those
spectacular futuristic Goosson-Hammeras sets — this is the man who made The Electric House, after all — and with Keaton in the comic lead Just
Imagine might have turned into a
masterpiece instead of a curio. According to the imdb.com “Trivia” posters, Just
Imagine was the first
science-fiction talkie ever made, as well as the first science-fiction musical,
and the only big-budget science-fiction film from a major studio until The
Day the Earth Stood Still 21 years
later. The last seems a bit hard to believe (though I’ve racked my brain for a
contradictory example and so far haven’t come up with one), but it’s certainly
a film that deserves an audience if for no other reason than its sheer
unusualness!

Friday, July 24, 2015

The “feature” I ran last night was a Lifetime movie, Love
You to Death, which for some reason I’ve
been unable to find on imdb.com — director Rick Bota (whose name conjured up
the inevitable joke — “Ah, it was directed by a leather pouch used in Spain to
carry wine!”) and star Lindsey Shaw (who was born in 1985 and therefore presumably
played one of the high-school student protagonists’ parents) are credited with
another TV movie from 2015, Secret Summer, but it had different writers and a different story (and Love
You to Death takes place during the school
year, not in summer) that imdb.com lists as “filming,” and Bota also directed Damaged, a 2014 Lifetime movie shown a couple of weeks ago.
There doesn’t seem to be an imdb.com page for this Love You to Death, but after the surprising power of The
Bride He Bought Online, Love You to
Death was a return to the slovenliness of
most of Lifetime’s output. (No fewer than four production companies — Anchor
Bay Films, Dolphin Entertainment, Aircraft Pictures, Corkscrew Media — are
credited with this slice of cheese, as are one “producer,” Anthony Leo; two
“supervising producers,” Sarah Soboleski and Sue Bristow; four “associate
producers,” Megan Ellstrom, Aaron Champion, Javier Riera, and Jennifer Pun; and
four “executive producers,” Scott Henuset, Andrew Rosen, Kevin Kasha, and Bill
O’Dowd.)

The film opens with a powerful sequence in which a young blonde woman
is being chased on a lonely country road by a sinister figure driving a large
black car. “I won’t get in,” she says as the driver pulls up alongside her, but
needless to say he won’t take no for an answer. She tries to flee, but
eventually … well, we presume he catches up with her and kills her because we
see a close-up of her screaming, and the next scene is a jump-cut to a poster
on a tree announcing that she’s missing. It also says her name is Melissa
Kennedy, and the main part of the movie consists of a student at Hampton
Preparatory School, Sylvia, who’s attracted to a mysterious young man named
Lucas who seems to have all the money and material objects he needs (he’s the
child of super-rich parents who, like Natalie Wood’s father in Rebel
Without a Cause, leave the country a lot
and leave him alone in their big house). He drives around in a hot, low-slung
sports car that practically becomes a character in itself, especially the way
he drives it, loudly and obnoxiously, and he bonds with Sylvia mainly due to
their shared interests in comic books (Sylvia is an aspiring comics artist
who’s done a book of her own called Love Me) and silent films (Sylvia works at the local
silent-movie theatre — this town doesn’t look big enough to have a current movie theatre, let alone a recherché revival house showing things like Broken
Blossoms and Nosferatu, clips from both of which appear here, but there it
is) as well as LP records (though the song Sylvia and Lucas listen to on vinyl
on his state-of-the-art turntable sounds pretty much like every other song in
the film). But their relationship is hampered by the way police are sniffing
around Lucas because they suspect him of Melissa’s murder, and in particular by
the harassment of Sylvia’s ex-boyfriend Harry, who works at the local comic
book store and, like Sylvia, has ambitions to make his living as a comic-book
artist.

It’s probably not that
big a surprise — or a spoiler — to say that about two-thirds of the way through
the movie, after throwing us a red herring in the form of an unrelated
character who’s a male former friend of Lucas and/or Sylvia, writer Kat Candler
and director Bota throw us a reversal that Harry, not Lucas, is the real killer
of Melissa — apparently they were dating, she threw him over for hot, rich and
darkly mysterious Lucas, and Harry never forgave her for jilting him for the
rich guy. He got back at her by chasing her through the field and killing her —
only in the meantime the police, still investigating the case, have found her
body and initially linked her to Lucas via his DNA. Eventually, though, the
cops realize the truth after Harry’s violent confrontation with Lucas, in which
he wounds him in the face, and ultimately Harry is arrested and there’s a brief
period in which the traumas of the case put Lucas and Sylvia on the outs, but
they reconcile — or at least start the process — when he shows up at the
silent-movie theatre while she’s putting up the marquee letters for a showing
of Nosferatu. (Come to think of
it, Sunrise might have been a
more appropriate choice since it’s a film about an estranged couple who reconcile, but it’s probably
still under copyright whereas the films they did use are in the public domain.) Love You to
Death is an O.K. movie, but the talent gap
between Christine Conradt as both writer and director of The Bride He
Bought Online and the work of Candler and
Bota here is pretty big; Bota is utterly unable to bring to his work the kind
of atmospherics Conradt supplied for Bride (as I noted in yesterday’s comments, Conradt as director mastered the
suspense editing and Gothic flavor needed to make a script by Conradt the
writer work), and the overall story seems flat and ordinary without Conradt’s
flair to make it come alive.

Thursday, July 23, 2015

I watched a Lifetime movie
I recorded last weekend that turned out to be surprisingly good: The Bride
He Bought Online. Judging from the title I
assumed that Christine Conradt was involved, and it turned out she not only
wrote the script (solo this time, though on some of her previous Lifetime
scripts she’s had collaborators) but directed (her debut in that role) — and
turned in a mighty fine job as director, bringing to the film all the tight
suspense editing and neo-Gothic atmosphere needed for a Christine Conradt
script to work on screen. Judging from the title and the previews I had
expected a story something like the 1949 film Caught — naïve young woman with dreams of marrying into
money meets a super-rich guy online and ends up in a miserable marriage, then
realizes her only option if she wants to save her sanity (or her life) is to
flee — but I guess the powers that be at Lifetime decided they’ve done this
trope to death lately (without the marriage, it’s the basic plot of Fifty
Shades of Grey and all the ripoffs of
that mega-hit Lifetime has been doing lately, including Sugar Daddies) and so instead Conradt’s story centers around
three high-school seniors, Kaley (Annalisa Cochrane), Avery (Anne Winters) and
Mandy (Lauren Gaw), who have started a supposedly secret blog (though with over
3,000 followers how secret can it possibly be?) on which they post smartphone
video footage of pranks they’ve played on the unsuspecting.

While surfing the
Web they stumble on a dating site for men seeking women from outside the U.S.
to marry — the sort of thing that caters to the hard-core sexists out there who
have decided American women are too pushy and mouthy and want more submissive
females from other cultures where women are still being raised to be
subservient to men. (There’ll probably be mass heart attacks among these
creatures if Hillary Clinton gets elected President.) As a gag for their blog,
they decide to create a fake profile and post it to this site, grabbing a photo
of a model from the Philippines named Diwata (who, unbeknownst to them, is
actually dead, though since a still photo of her is shown Conradt and her
producers, Pierre David and Tom Berry, needed an actress, Kaitlyn Fae, to
“play” her for the photo) and writing up the sort of profile they think would
attract a suitable pigeon they can humiliate on the Web. Said pigeon is John
(Travis Hammer), an ace computer programmer who, like virtually all movie
characters who work with computers, is drawn as a nerd (though Travis Hammer is
tall, thin, reasonably well built and with a nice face — apparently they
thought that by giving him a bad haircut and a scraggly three-day shadow on his
cheeks they could make him look homelier than he is), and who’s sufficiently
attractive that he blows off an attempt by co-worker Quincy (T. J. Alvarado) to
set him up with a woman and also fends off the advances of his neighbor Wanda
(Kesia Elwyn), a marvelously ambiguous character who seems to be involved in
some vague but obviously illegal enterprise that turns out to be human
trafficking. Anyway, the girls invite John to meet “Diwata” at the airport and
then stand him up (though for a while I was thinking they’d actually have
Mandy, whose last name is Kim, whose parents are Korean and who’s therefore the
only one of the trio who could pass herself off as Filipina, meet John and
impersonate the fictitious “Diwata”) and post the video of him pacing the
airport, staying there for hours and finally realizing that “Diwata” wasn’t
going to show onto their blog — from which it “goes viral” and twists the knife
into John’s humiliation.

John hatches an elaborate revenge plot which involves
him hiring a male prostitute named Nick (Randy Blekitas, by far the cutest guy
in the movie, far out-foxing Avery’s wimpy,
nerdy boyfriend Trevor, played by Chase Austin). Nick shows up, collects his
usual $200 fee, then starts to take off his pants and is startled when John
explains he doesn’t want to
have sex with Nick — “I’m not Gay,” he says, and Nick reacts with an “I’ve
heard that one before” shrug before
John explains what he does want to hire Nick to do: to cruise Kaley and Mandy at the skateboard
arena where they hang out and get himself invited to a “party” so John can
kidnap the girls, hold them in a deserted old building (some sort of industrial
construction with a lot of
corridors so that, even if they free themselves from the straps he’s tied them
up with, they’ll have no idea how to get out) and terrorize them with what sort
of fate he has in mind for them. Eventually it develops that his revenge for
the girls having tormented him and put him in so much emotional pain will be to
sell them to human traffickers, and he actually turns Kaley over to a tall,
intimidating-looking guy — only the guy reneges on paying John, so he takes the
other two girls back to his hideout. The one true good guy in all this is the
detective the police put in charge of finding the kidnapped girls, Kathy
Schumaker (a marvelously hard-edged performance by Alexandra Paul), who is able
to trace Nick and get him to rat out John. Though Nick has no idea where John
is holding the girls, Avery manages to make a call on a cell phone she
concealed on her person and the police are able to use that signal to trace
where they are and rescue them — though not before John becomes a true figure
of pathos as he makes a speech about how sorry he is that his desire for love
and companionship led to all this, and then shoots himself.

What’s especially
fascinating about The Bride He Met Online is the moral complexity and dramatic ambiguity that sets Conradt’s work
(as melodramatic and silly as it gets sometime) apart from that of other Lifetime
writers: John isn’t an altogether bad guy — a basically decent man who stakes
so much on his mail-order girlfriend that when he’s set up, and especially when
he’s publicly humiliated on the Internet, he’s pushed into a mean and twisted
form of revenge (in some ways he’s a male version of Madame Butterfly), and
Kaley is shown as a selfish little creep whose only concern is building a
popular blog that she can sell for a fortune no matter how many people get hurt in the process. We want to
see her get her “comeuppance” even though we’re also horrified by what happens
to her at the end and think being forced into prostitution and turned into a
sex slave is far more dire a fate than she
deserves. I was amused to read the posts about this film on the imdb.com
message boards, and in particular how many people were bothered by the fact
that Conradt created both John and Kaley as multi-dimensional characters, neither
all good nor all bad, and wanted this film to have more clearly defined heroes
and villains than the anti-hero and anti-villain Conradt gave them. I was also
amused that at least two of the message board contributors wondered if Conradt
was setting up a sequel — which in this case might not be a bad idea: a The
Bride He Bought Online, Part 2: Kaley’s Revenge might actually be quite a good movie. The Bride
He Bought Online is quite an impressive
directorial debut for Christine Conradt and makes me wish she can do more
movies as a director — indeed, she’s good enough to break out of the Lifetime
ghetto and make films for theatrical release.

Monday, July 20, 2015

The film was Aelita:
Queen of Mars, a legendary Soviet
Russian film from 1924 — one of those oddball movies that everybody who’s into
the history of film, and especially the history of science fiction on film, has heard of but few people
have actually seen. I got this on amazon.com on a DVD of uncertain provenance —
the box attributes the source to the Blackhawk Films collection (Blackhawk
Films was a company in the 1960’s that sold 8 and 16 mm copies of classic
silent — and some sound — films to home collectors in the age before VCR’s,
DVD’s and cable movie channels, and they made a lot of cool stuff available, including virtually all
of Chaplin’s pre-1918 output and most of the Laurel and Hardy shorts) but
there’s a “Kino International Presents” title at the beginning which makes me
think the makers of this DVD just copied it off a Kino videotape. (Aelita is not listed in Kino Lorber’s current DVD catalogue.) Aelita: Queen of
Mars was a quite elaborate
film, set mostly in the then-contemporary Soviet Union (though the titles
carefully establish the date as 1921 instead of 1924, I suspect to indicate
that economic conditions had improved since Lenin, in his New Economic Policy
of 1921, had actually moved the Soviet Union away from pure socialism and
towards a mixed economy, and therefore the horrible privations the people in
the movie are going through were supposed to belong in the past) and only
incidentally on Mars — though the stills everyone who’s read about this film
has seen take place in the Martian fantasy sequences and feature Yulita
Solntseva in the title role, with her hair cut severely short in the
helmet-like bob later identified with Louise Brooks and with such a slim figure
there are close-ups, especially in profile, where she looks like a boy. Her
elaborate costume is a sort of cross between a sheath dress and a jumpsuit and
she’s got bamboo stakes sticking out of her hair, and the actress playing her
maid Ihoshka (Aleksandra Peregonets) is dressed even more weirdly, in a black
outfit whose bamboo stakes are angular, fastened at the waist and the ankles
and bulging out at the knees. (What purpose this preposterous accessory was
supposed to serve remains a mystery, but it sure looks cool.)

What almost
nobody who hasn’t actually seen Aelita knows is that those elaborate scenes on Mars are not part of the story reality; they’re simply the
dreams (or Walter Mitty-esque daydreams — though this movie was made 15 years
before James Thurber wrote “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty”) of the film’s
male lead, Engineer Loss[1]
(Nikolai Tsereteli). Loss is out of town a lot — he lives in Moscow with his
wife Natasha (Valentina Kuindzhi) but he’s frequently away for months on end
fixing up power plants that had been destroyed or damaged during the four-year
civil war that followed the 1917 Revolution. While he’s out of town — and
actually even while he’s in town — Natasha is being cruised by Viktor Ehrlich (Pavel Pol), a former
Tsarist official who got a position on the ration board set up by the Bolsheviks
and is using that job to steal necessities like sugar and sell them on the
black market. (It’s a fascinating irony that according to this film, made just
seven years after the Revolution, Tsarist officials are shown worming their way
into the Soviet bureaucracy and using their positions to profiteer. That also
happened at the end of the
Soviet Union, as the nomenklatura who had been running the state-owned enterprises often grabbed them for
far less than they were worth when the post-Soviet Russian government
privatized them, thereby becoming the super-rich, super-powerful “Oligarchs”
who bedeviled both Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin until Vladimir Putin
finally started having them arrested and/or driven into exile.) There’s a Mrs.
Ehrlich (N. Tretyakova), but we see very little of her and in any case Mr.
Ehrlich is not about to let her existence get in the way of his attempts to
seduce Natasha, which include plying her with gifts from his black-market
connections and taking her to secret dances and parties where his 1-percent
buddies hang out and enjoy such forbidden pleasures as caviar and wine — even
though there’s a great scene where one of the guests at Ehrlich’s party spits
out the wine and says, “This is just vinegar! Now in the old days … ” and director Yakov Protazanov dissolves
to some shots of what it was like in the old days, with him and his cronies in
a spectacular mansion, wearing fancy clothes and living it up while the
proletarians and the peasants suffer.

What’s fascinating is that, even though
there must have been some propagandistic intent behind Aelita, it doesn’t become obvious or preachy until the
last reel; instead Protazanov and his writers (Aleksei Fajko and Fyodor Ozep,
who later became a director himself, discovered Anna Sten and cast her in a
German-language adaptation of The Brothers Karamazov which caught the eye of Sam Goldwyn and led him to
sign her to a U.S. deal, adapting a novel by Aleksei Tolstoy, a distant
relative of Leo Tolstoy who became a popular novelist in the Soviet Union) are
quite unsparing in their depiction of the privations the central characters are
going through and the bizarre bureaucracy that guides their lives. The
descriptions of life in Soviet Russia in the early 1920’s tally with what I’ve
read in novels as diverse as Ayn Rand’s We the Living and Boris Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago, and at least one scene — in which Loss is
solemnly informed that he’ll have to give up the second room he has in the
attic of his boarding house (which he’s been using for scientific experiments
to perfect a rocket fuel that will overcome earth’s gravity and get him to
Mars) because another tenant who doesn’t have a home at all needs it — couldn’t
help but remind me of Mel Brooks’ marvelous sendup of the early Soviet bureaucracy
in his little-known film The Twelve Chairs. It also reminded me of George Orwell’s 1984 and in particular his acid comment that the state
of life in Oceania was like “a besieged city, where the possession of a lump of
horseflesh makes the difference between wealth and poverty.” It’s fascinating
that a film whose reputation is as an early science-fiction effort should be
more interesting when it takes place on earth — and particularly Moscow — in
its own time, but the science-fiction elements take place only in the mind of
Loss, who to overcome his personal frustrations — especially his romantic ones
— has invented this elaborate fantasy of Aelita; her father Tuskub (Konstantin
Eggert), the king of Mars; and a heavy-duty class struggle in which the Martian
workers are literally kept in
suspended animation, frozen on ice in great refrigerators, so they don’t have
to be paid when their services are not needed. The scenes of class oppression
and struggle on Mars so closely parallel the ones on Earth in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, made three years later, it seems almost certain Lang and his scenarist
(and then-wife) Thea von Harbou had seen Aelita and were deliberately ripping it off. At the same
time the influence between Russian and German filmmakers probably went both
ways because the stylized sets of Aelita can’t help but recall The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari — a film which was just five years old when Aelita was made and was influencing filmmakers all over
the world.

Two-thirds of the way through the movie Loss comes home from his
latest assignment bringing a power plant in the sticks back on line and sees
the shadows of Ehrlich and Natasha embracing and kissing. He goes berserk and
shoots at his wife, then flees and assumes the identity of a friend of his
named Spiridinov (though there are scenes where they both appear, imdb.com’s
credits list Nikolai Tsereteli as playing both Loss and Spiridinov, and it’s quite possible he
was doing the Lon Chaney, Sr. thing and playing a dual role in which one of his
characters would impersonate the other), who supposedly left the Soviet Union
and exiled himself to the West, but — it turns out at the end — was really
murdered by Ehrlich. Loss flees by getting into his spacecraft and, with his
friend Gusev (Nikolai Bataloff) — a Red Army veteran who was in a military
hospital being treated for what would now be called post-traumatic stress
disorder (PTSD) and who fell in love with his nurse, Masha (Vera Orlova) — the
two travel to Mars. Only there’s a third man on board, Kravtsov (Igor Ilynsky),
a police officer wanna-be who thinks if he can solve Natasha’s murder he’ll be
given a job as a detective. Kravtsov stows away on the Mars flight, and for the
last 20 minutes we finally get an interplanetary action sequence: Aelita, who’s seen Loss through
a series of prisms invented by a Martian scientist as a sort of telescope, has
been in love with him even before he arrives, and when his ship is about to
land she kills her father Tuskub because he wants the Martian military to
exterminate the out-of-planeters while she, of course, wants Loss spared so she
can have a torrid affair with him. Gusev manages to get the workers on Mars to
rebel before one-third of them get refrigerated — in the film’s most
heavy-handed propaganda scene, he even forges a sickle and combines it with the
hammer he used to make it to form the Soviet symbol — and Aelita announces that
she will lead the revolution herself to overthrow the Council of Elders. Even
Loss doesn’t like the idea of a queen leading a revolution (I suspect the
writers may have been thinking of French King Louis XVI’s short-lived attempt
to co-opt the 1789 Revolution against him by proclaiming himself “the first revolutionary”), and in the end
there’s a chaotic storming-the-Martian-palace scene until … Loss comes to, it
turns out it was all a dream, and he’s not in legal jeopardy after all because
he merely wounded Natasha, he didn’t kill
her. Instead they reconcile and Kravtsov finally makes his bones as a detective
by arresting Ehrlich for the murder of the real Spiridinov.

What makes Aelita unusual is that it’s not only a weird mix of
science fiction, socialist realism and soap opera, but Protazanov (the only
Russian filmmaker who did important work on both sides of the Revolution; he left during the Civil
War and settled in France, but the Soviet film industry brought him back to
make this movie and he continued to work in his native land until 1943, when he
made his last film, Adventures in Bokhara; he died, ironically, on August 9, 1945, the same day as the explosion
of the second U.S. atom bomb over Nagasaki, Japan) and his writers are clearly
more interested in the terrestrial scenes than the science-fictional ones. At
the same time, Aelita has the
usual Russian predilection for romantic angst — I can’t think of another science-fiction film
built so strongly about a dysfunctional relationship until another Russian production, Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 Solaris (in which the hero — played, as here, by a rather
homely but not unattractive actor — is stationed on a space station orbiting
the planet Solaris, whose sentient ocean sends him a replica of his previously
dead wife, but he makes the same mistakes with her he made back on Earth when
she was still normally alive), nor one with this much emotional turmoil. If you
want a science-fiction film from the silent era that deals with Mars travel in
the way we’d expect, the 1918 Danish Himmelskibet (A Trip to Mars) is far closer than Aelita — but Aelita remains fascinating not only in its own right but for the films it
influenced, including Metropolis, the Flash Gordon serials and even (in the character of the
comic-relief stowaway) the 1960’s TV show Lost in Space.

[1]— That’s how it’s spelled on the titles to this film,
though imdb.com and other sources spell the character’s last name “Los.”
Blackhawk Films did some wonderful work preserving silent films and making them
available, but they weren’t always that cautious when it came to their titles.